Marktopia

I hate to put something that is Windows only as my pick, but Photosynth is too damn cool to avoid.  Microsoft is allowing people to upload pictures of locations and spaces and then using magic technology, creating 3D experiences for them.  You do have to have a MS Passport account to sign up, but after you do, you can create your own experiences as well on there using your own photos.  It is still buggy at times and requires IE, but it is worth a look just to see what can be done.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t made this a pick yet, so I figured I had to throw it out there.  Pandora is a internet radio service that learns what you like and don’t like in an effort to introduce you to new music.  You start off by giving it an artist you like, then plays a song by them.  After that first song, it makes a guess about another song you might like.  You can then give it a thumbs up or thumbs down to help Pandora learn.  This keeps going as long as you like, occasionally going back to songs you marked with a thumbs up.  The best part, it is all free, with the limitation that it only is available in the US and UK.  If you are a music person and havn’t taken a look at Pandora, give it a whirl.

Rebekah and I have been tossing around a shared movie database where we could keep track of the movies we have, what we have watched, and an easy way to pick a movie to watch.  After some planning, it was going to be an elaborate web database project.  Thinking that would take a fair amount of time, I investigated a program that might be able to handle this already and stumbled upon DVDPedia from Bruji.  For 18 bucks, you get searching and importing data from the web, a customizable interface and smart folders to make that list of romance movies under 90 minutes.  As a bonus, Bruji also released a free app for the iPhone called PocketPedia that does the same stuff and can sync with the desktop application.  If you are trying to organize stuff and maxed out the usefulness of the Amazon Media Collection, I would recommend checking this out.

This pick will not be for everyone, as it is kind of different.  Fuzzy Clock allows you to replace the clock on the menu bar for your Mac with a human readable display.  For example, instead of saying 8:25, it would write out twentyfive past eight.  It allows you to customize it a bunch of different ways, including different localizations so your clock could be in German if you like.  It is free and kind of fun.

A belated Pick of the Week, I chose a really useful tool for all sorts of web design and development, Firebug.  This is really useful to inspect page elements for CSS styles, but really shines when inspecting Javascript errors.  You can view the console easily and really debug Javascript problems, something that was very troublesome in the past.  If you are doing any sort of web design or development, I highly recommend Firebug, a free extension for Firefox.

As you may have noticed after the redesign of my site, in the comments area there is a nifty little icon next to people.  This feature is called a Gravatar, and it is my pick of the week.  Gravatars allow you to have a common icon on any site that uses that service.  It is really easy to sign up for an account and upload your picture.  Then each time you make a comment on a site that supports them, it will grab the picture by the email address you use.  It is a simple idea, but works really nicely.

Note: If you don’t have a Gravatar, my site automagically generates an icon for you, so you don’t have to see some weird grey figure next to your name.

Since I am going with podcasts this week, I thought I give you two different options as Picks of the Week. The first is This American Life, a podcast that takes one topic each week and looks at it from a number of different angles. It sounds weird, but it is wonderfully hypnotic. You can find out more about it at their site and it is for free on iTunes.

My second pick, You Look Nice Today, is completely different and could even be for a different audience.  It is a collection of three guys basically doing stream of conciousness discussion about random, odd or even gross topics.  That being said, it is hilarious if you are up for bizarre humor, which I am.  It is also available for free on iTunes.

For the pick this week, I was inspired by my wife forgetting her iPod at home and not having a source of music for the day.  I looked for a way to share iTunes music from the home computer across the Internet.  After a brief search, I found Simplify Media, a client you install on your machine to share music libraries across the Internet.  It also allows you to share your libraries with up to 30 other people.  It isn’t perfect as it does not bring over ratings for songs, but it does bring playlists along so if you setup some clever playlists on your original machine, you should be all set.  Simplify Media is free to use as well, making it all the nicer.

For the Pick of the Week, I am choosing the one podcast I follow as soon as it comes out, Macbreak Weekly.  Macbreak is where my Pick of the Week started since each host does one on the show.  The show itself is entertaining because it not only covers the Mac news of the week, but often sidetracks into other discussions involving productivity, photos or random other technology.  Due to the sense of humor of each host and their interactions, it feels like a bunch of tech savvy friends hanging out and talking about Mac stuff.  I find it entertaining each week all for no cost.

Lots of people ask me what I use for a web editor, expecting the answer to be Dreamweaver almost everytime.  When I tell them I use Textmate, I get an odd look almost everytime.  Textmate is a text editor on steroids.  First off, it looks about as good as a text editor can look and if you don’t like the default look, you can tweak it however you like.  Next, you can open either a file by itself or a folder using the sidebar.  If you open a folder, you can quickly get to different files easily in a tabbed interface.  This all makes it easy to get to the files you want to edit.

Luckily, Textmate isn’t just pretty, it is also really useful.  It comes with bundles that allow you to perform shortcut macros for whichever language you are programming in.  In my case, lots of times that is plain HTML and/or CSS.  Textmate can tell by the file what type it is and automatically defaults to the shortcuts for that type.  Textmate is one of those programs that seems expensive for what it does, but when you see someone who has mastered the shortcuts, it is like watching a magician put out code.  If you have moved past the Design View of Dreamweaver and find the code view lacking, I would recommend checking this out.  Also, if you are programming in Rails or PHP, I would HIGHLY recommend giving it a spin.  You might find that you can not live with out it.